Suha Taweel Kadry is one of our veteran Arabic teachers, as part of our Language Center, one of the largest schools of Arabic for Communication in Israel. This year, in 2019 – 2020, we had 240 students in five levels.
Yohanan (J.) Elihay, photo credit here
On Saturday, July 11, J. Elihay, the author of books used by the JICC, died at the age of 94. In response, Suha published an opinion piece in the Ha’aretz Daily newspaper. Here are a few sections from that piece.
Born as Jean Laraouh, he was a French linguist and monk who moved in 1956 to Israel, where he changed his name to Yohanan Elihay. He researched spoken Palestinian Arabic for decades and did his best to use the knowledge he acquired to serve as a bridge between the two divided peoples living in Israel. He won the Yigal Allon Prize for Exemplary Pioneering Activities last year.
Many Arabic teachers are familiar with his books. They all agree he was a kind person who loved the Arabic he researched and was endowed with generosity and a love of mankind. All who knew his books were amazed by the Frenchman’s expertise and by his comprehensive knowledge of both Arabic and Hebrew. Besides his linguistic talents, he was blessed with a well-developed sense of humor.
At the same time, both of their relationships with Arabic and Arabic culture were and continue to be complex. His books expressed chauvinistic views Palestinian society; she told herself that it was part of the era that he lived.
Over the last two decades, in my work as a teacher of Arabic as a second language, I had the opportunity to meet Elihay twice. The first time, we invited him to speak with my Arabic students at the Jerusalem Intercultural Center. I met him the second time at a lunch that one of the students organized in honor of the publication of his last dictionary. I was disappointed in the first meeting by his request to speak with the students in Hebrew.
“I don’t feel the Arabic flowing in my mouth, like it used to,” he explained. I convinced myself that age was taking its toll.
And despite these conflicting feelings, she is saddened by the loss.
As I write these lines, and from the moment his death was announced, my telephone is being flooded with messages from students who felt the need to stop for a moment to show their respect for him. It is strange that I was the conduit through which they chose to express their feelings of loss. And it is even stranger that I feel his absence and the need to part ways, even though we didn’t know each other personally. Perhaps, and it is comforting to think of him this way, this non-Jewish land knew how to love him back. May Allah have mercy on him!
You can read the whole piece in English here, as well as the Hebrew and Arabic versions here and here respectively.
Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its continued support of our Language Center over the years.
